Good Alaskan Morning!
I'm getting a centos box to care and feed for as part of my day job, so I
have a legit reason to spend 'quality' work time maintaining EPEL variants
of some of the Fedora packages I use and maintain currently.
Anything specific I should read up on with regard to EPEL before I dig in?
Beyond the links at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL?
I'm specifically looking for information on not screwing up EPEL branch
initialization, cvs and plague usage.
-jef

Hi all,
I've just made the request for an EL-5 branch for rt3. After some mail
discussion with Marek Mahut, it appears he will not have enough time to
maintain rt3 in EPEL, so I'll be the primary maintainer and he'll be
co-maintainer. The only problem is rt3 is really a big piece of code and
our perl-fu might not be strong enough in case of troubles, so any help
to maintain this software for EPEL would be greatly appreciated. There
was more than Marek and I showing interest in bringing this to EPEL, so
I'm looking forward to hear from you.
Regards,
Xavier

Agh... I was checking to see where the notes I posted on Thursday
were. and for some reason they never got out of drafts. I would blame
google.. but they never are wrong. Here are the notes from the last
meeting.
--
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

= Weekly EPEL Summary =
Week 09/2008 2008-03-09 -> 2008-03-15
== Most important happenings ==
* Held meeting at scheduled time.
* RHEL-5.2 beta announced. Please test :).
== Mailing list ==
=== Noteworthy discussions ===
* RHEL 5.2 beta is out. Some EPEL packages will need to be removed as
they are in 5.2
== Meeting ==
=== Last weeks meeting ===
Full Logs:
* https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2008-March/msg00060.html
Attendees:
* <stickster>
* <smooge>
* <quaid>
* <nirik>
* <mmcgrath>
* <knurd>
* <jwb>
* <jmbuser>
* <f13>
Thanks to everyone for attending.
Summary:
* fill the steering committee; one self-nomination: Xavier Lamien|
all | http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/Misc
* need to send another email to the list to get nominations.
* Status Reports | all | Build System, Packages in waiting etc
* build system working okish
* no problems that were reported.
* make broken dep reports work and send them to the list | mmcgrath
| http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/Misc
* more of a status report. reports are working and look good.
* EL-4/EL-5 pushes | knurd
* pushes going ahead as planned. Working on getting it covered by
more than one person.
* RHEL-5.2beta
* several packages are going to be replaced with EPEL packages.
* EPEL will not have a seperate fork for each EL-5.y.z branch...
unless there is a demand and volunteers for it.
* KojiAndBodhiForEpel | mmcgrath, _blah_ |
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/KojiAndBodhiForEpel
* discussion covered why we didn't have it for new people on the conversation
* discussion of why CentOS is not used.
* third party vendors want items built with RHEL binaries.. but
they aren't showing up on list
* EPEL being used in RHxx training as built against RHEL binaries
* more mirrors | smooge | http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/Misc
* a request was made to the mirror list and several mirrors jumped
on board. We should have a larger coverage for users.
* marketing: Logo, Posters, etc?| smooge |
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/Misc
* a request was made on the web-page for artwork. No takers yet for art.
=== Next Meeting ===
Wednesday, 20080326 at 18:00 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
The topics scheduled for the next meeting as well as a rough status
for all in-progress steering committee tasks can always be found in
the wiki at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Schedule
== Stats ==
=== General ===
Number of EPEL Contributors:176
We welcome 1 new contributors: ianweller
=== EPEL 5 ===
Number of source packages: 1143
Number of binary packages: 1845
There are 1 new Packages:
* maradns | Authoritative and recursive DNS server made with security in mind
=== EPEL 4 ===
Number of source packages: 671
Number of binary packages: 1089
----
["CategoryEPELReports"]
--
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

Hi,
Would anyone be angry at me if I bootstrapped a package by encapsulating
a binary rpm into srpm, importing it in CVS, building, and then
rebuilding against itself?
(The package in question is OpenJDK, which will be ready in a few days;
hopefully one or two. It needs either itself or gcj 1.5.0 to build, and
currently we only have gcj 1.4.2).
Thanks,
--
Lubomir Kundrak (Red Hat Security Response Team)

This mail (thread) about puppet-0.24.2 from the
fedora-infrastructure-list I was pointed to when yesterday I found out a
couple of managed machines did not behave as expected.
Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>>> Beware! Don't do it!
>>>
>>> puppet 0.24.2 has been released and is in epel testing, which means if you
>>> yum update a machine... it'll get picked up. And it doesn't work with our
>>> setup. The 0.24.2 puppet nodes are not compatable with 0.24.1 puppet
>>> masters.
>>>
>>> I (or someone) will need to test some things before doing this upgrade.
>> Ouch. That's uhm not a minor update :). Well it could be worse (...
>> plunges through cfengine minor update changes..)
>
> In fairness to the puppet guys I talked to them about it and they said it
> should be considered a bug, just one that slipped into the release.
>
It'd be the second time puppet gets upgrades in EPEL with unstable
API/behaviour, this time it even manages to destroy a couple of boxes.
One of many, many files managed by puppet on an EL4 box with
puppet-master running on a EL5 box:
[root@app20 ~]# cat /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg
420 file 0 0
{md5}c6519debb77ad5428c6d3d678da81f99[root@app20 ~]#
Same thing happened at home where Fedora 8 runs a puppet-master for a
couple of Fedora 7 and EL5 boxes.
The most amazing thing is... EL4 boxes get the update (becoming
incompatible with the EL5 box managing them) before even my Fedora 8 box
(managing a couple of EL5 boxes) knows about it in updates-testing.
I'm sure you all appreciate people are running *enterprise linux* for a
reason, and do not want to bother with package foo like this like if it
were Fedora.
--
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip